The USDA has decided in its infinite wisdom, despite pink slime and a few other debacles of the food industry, to test a program allowing chicken companies to check their own livestock and decide whether or not the chickens are safe to eat. The USDA claims this will save them tens of millions of dollars. Well, USDA, I can save you even more. If you’re going to let the chicken companies inspect their own chickens, just trash the whole program.

With their “We are the 99%” chant, Occupy Wall Street protesters call for and end to the corporate corruption of democracy, to America’s two-tiered system of justice, and to the rigged economics that concentrates the nation’s wealth in the hands of the top 1%. By cheating, says Rolling Stone contributing editor Matt Taibbi, who

As the tumult over the S&P downgrade of U.S. debt continues, so does the fleecing of America. We are discussing slashing safety net programs that protect average citizens without jobs in this economy. Meanwhile, Washington considers the Freedom to Invest Act of 2011 (H.R.1834), corporate welfare for “super citizen” companies that moved those [...]

Another bad jobless claims report… and this time Washington seems to have finally noticed that there are some unemployed people out here in the sticks. But instead of jobs programs the geniuses are proposing … what else? … even more tax cuts. (And after a few hours they’ll go back to complaining about [...]

Some conservatives see all these fact-laden critiques of our various GOP manufactroversies (see Ryan, Paul) and wonder where are the Democratic plans to solve the financial crisis? (I have been asked this, quite vehemently, myself.)

I think we’d all love to live every phase of our lives in happy accord with high moral and ethical principles. We’d love it if we were never confronted by logical contradictions and cognitive dissonance, by cases where our walk was at odds with our talk. But the truth is that we live [...]

There have been some tentative signs that the economy may be, well not quite recovering, but not falling as fast. One of these often cited is that the American consumer came back and shopped this past holiday season.

Make no mistake – the demonization of public workers is just the latest in a long series of distractions by the right wing and economic elite as they pick the pockets of the “other 95% of Americans”. This coordinated approach is nothing new, but the agenda of wealth theft is taking on a new form [...]

There is no question that the Right has been financed by a select and small group of donors for close to forty years now; significant business players like Bob Perry and the Koch Brothers who more than likely don’t have a political bone in their bodies, but look at the their investment in politics as smart business.

Feed, Badges & Tools

"The world is a rigged game"

Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone: “Word has leaked out that the London-based firm ICAP, the world’s largest broker of interest-rate swaps, is being investigated by American authorities for behavior that sounds eerily reminiscent of the Libor mess. Regulators are looking into whether or not a small group of brokers at ICAP may have worked with up to 15 of the world’s largest banks to manipulate ISDAfix, a benchmark number used around the world to calculate the prices of interest-rate swaps.”

On winning and values

So, right-wingers, you want a society where families are stable, where everybody looks like you and shares your Christian faith, and where the government pretty much stays out of your business? It’s not in some Randian fantasy, it’s right here in the USA.